7 items tagged “mashups”
2009
Muck Rack: Links posted by Guardian Journalists on Twitter. I’m rather impressed by the Sawhorse Media collection of Twitter aggregation sites (Muck Rack aggregates journalists)—a simple idea very well executed. Here’s a nice example—this page shows links posted to Twitter by known Guardian journalists, but goes a step further and scrapes in the favicon, the real title of the page and resolves the domain from any shortened links.
My Guardian OpenPlatform API’n’Data Hacks’n’Mashups Roundup. Superb collection of Guardian Open Platform mashups from Tony Hirst, all of which use free online tools such as Yahoo! Pipes and Many Eyes. We invited Tony in to give a tech talk at the Guardian last week.
2008
Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets. I hadn’t played with =importHTML in Google spreadsheets, which lets you suck in data from an HTML table or list somewhere on the web. This tutorial takes it further, bringing Wikipedia, Yahoo! Pipes and KML in to the mix.
Secure mashups with dojox.secure (via) dojox.secure is brilliant and terrifying at the same time. It provides a full featured API for running untrusted JavaScript in a sandbox, by parsing and validating that code against a variant of Douglas Crockford’s ADsafe JavaScript subset. It could be fantastically useful, but it’s difficult to judge how secure this approach really is.
Show Us a Better Way. The UK Government’s Power of Information Taskforce are running a mashup competition (a.k.a. “ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated”) with a £20,000 prize fund and gigabytes of brand new data and APIs. This is a great opportunity for the software community to demonstrate how important this kind of open data really is.
2007
In the long term, I want to replace JavaScript and the DOM with a smarter, safer design. In the medium term, I want to use something like Google Gears to give us vats with which we can have safe mashups. But in the short term, I recommend that you be using Firefox with No Script. Until we get things right, it seems to be the best we can do.
Every mashup attempts to expand until it can do social networking. Those that can't are replaced by those that can.